Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, by Aaron Lansky

This book will appeal to all bibliophiles—appropriately, I picked it up at a library sale—and as one who has studied, if only briefly, the Yiddish language. (I intend to add some Yiddish songs to my repertoire eventually.) It’s not about travel per se, but it does take us through a considerable range of geography and time. And Lansky’s missions eventually do take him to the Soviet Union and South America.

​The author opens with a vignette of saving thousands of Yiddish books from a Manhattan dumpster before explaining how he developed a love of the language in college, then went on to establish the National Yiddish Book Center. In the early years he pulled near-miracles on a shoestring budget, salvaging large collections from deceased or retired people, abandoned stacks of books in basements, or whole sections of community libraries that were about to be thrown out since no one read them anymore.

And so he often faces the question, “It’s a dead language—why bother?” In response, Lansky extolls the richness of Yiddish literature: the stories of Sholem Aleichem which were made into The Fiddler on the Roof are only the tip of the iceberg.

He also points out the knowledge that would have been lost without these books. One summer, a student intern at their Massachusetts headquarters, identifies a Dictionary of Political and Foreign Terminology in Yiddish (Kiev, 1929). Only it wasn’t in any databases. “Nearly eleven hundred pages long,” Lansky writes, “it was a scholar’s dream: a lexical snapshot showing exactly how Jews perceived the world around them at a moment of great social and political change. In fact the book was so significant I couldn’t understand why I had never heard of it before.” After running an ad, their office gets a call from the woman who donated the book from her father’s collection. On a visit to his cousin in 1929, Dor-Ber Slutski, who’d labored over the reference work a whole decade, the two had been together at the printer’s when the first copies came rolling off. Slutski gave him one, almost certainly the only copy now in existence – the entire press run was destroyed on the orders of Stalin’s government, on a whim about its political acceptability.

Outwitting History is, thus, a reminder of the value—and fragility—of the printed word. Let’s treasure it.

I’m stopping here to give myself a break on this fifth Thursday of the month. See you next week!

Women smuggling vodka into restaurants in pocketbooks or under chadors? Not the typical CNN-FOX view of Iran, but an inside perspective we could use more of in the West. That’s Christiane Bird’s Neither East nor West: One Woman’s Journey through the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For a link with last week’s entry, let me note that the first chapter begins with a quote from Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps.

Bird spent several years of her childhood in Iran as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in the early 1960s, and made this trip in the late 1990s, after the election of the relatively moderate president Khatami, which made it easier for Americans, at least in some numbers, to enter the country. She sought to understand Iran in all its complexity, to fathom the gap between its Muslim and its classical or pre-Muslim identity. The Shah had emphasized the greatness of the ancient empire at the expensive of religion, but priorities switched after 1979. Bird is also desparate to find out how things have changed since her residency and, more importantly, the Revolution—something she asks locals frequently, receiving various answers.

One of the most obvious differences is that the komiteh, or morality police, run around giving warnings and citations for women who expose too much hair or wear too much makeup. The hijab in Iran typically ranges from the chador, a body-length semicircular cloak tossed over the head and held together by hand, to the rusari, or scarf, often accompanying a manteau. (For specifics see this link.) Still, laws are stricter in some other Muslim countries; consider that in Saudi Arabia women aren’t even allowed to drive.

People always find detours around such restrictions, especially in large cities. She learns of imams who deal in “temporary marriage,” usually a thinly vailed form of prostitution, and of both setbacks and advances in women’s rights since the Revolution; such as the fact that a man can no longer unilaterally divorce his wife. One of Bird’s companions points out a café where friends used to hang out until the manager started reporting illicit meetings of couples to the komiteh. At a party in a wealthier North Teheran neighborhood, the rusari and manteaux come off, discussions of religious skepticism ensue, and the booze comes out.

In the Islamic Republic, Christians are allowed to consume alcohol – and produce it. That’s where the Armenians come in. Other ethnicities Bird encounters include Zoroastrians, who, as “people of the book” along with Jews and Christians, are a tolerated religion, as well as Azeri in the northwest and Turkmen in the northeast.

She visits a martyrs’ cemetery and sees the poignant commemorations family members hold for young males lost to the Iran-Iraq war. She adjusts to the schedules of sleeping, eating, waking and napping: businesses typically close “between 1 and 5 P.M., before reopening again until 10 or 11.” On a trip to the holy shrine of Hazrat-e Masumeh, as a Westerner and non-Muslim, she can only get in by disguising herself under a chador among throngs of pilgrims.

But her most adventurous outing is to the Valley of the Assassins, her attempt to retrace the footsteps of Freya Stark, whose Winter in ArabiaI’ve written about here. She can’t visit all the villages Stark did—some have disappeared, or maps are inaccurate—but she manages to see and climb a good deal of the mountainous landscape. She argues with her guide over a host of issues, including whether she can remove her rusari partway through a long, hot hike – after all, no one else is around, so it’s not like they’re “in public.” She also gets a simple village woman’s answer on what the revolution has brought: electricity, a road, a phone.

Bird covers the geographic variety of the country, the interactions of the poor and the elite, the religious and the secular, and she lays open the legalistic, the illicit, and the constant testing of boundaries in Iran. Fifteen years since its publication, it is still valuable reading for anyone wishing to understand this complex society beyond typical media tropes.

If exotic destinations are your thing, and you like thoughtful, entertaining literature, you’ll love Graham Greene, with his settings from Vietnam to Paraguay to Switzerland.

You might know him from the classic film noir The Third Man (1949), set in post-war Vienna, starring Orson Welles among others, and famous for its eerie theme music played on the zither. Greene wrote the screenplay and subsequently published the novella on which it was based. His 1940 The Power and the Glory, about a renegade Mexican priest, was made into 1947’s The Fugitive (dir. John Ford, starring Henry Fonda). And his 1958 Our Man in Havana, a satire on British intelligence, which also anticipates the Cuban Missile Crisis, was adapted into a movie of the same name the following year.

His first non-fiction travel book was Journey Without Maps (1936), a chronicle of his wanderings through the interior of Liberia when that territory was still uncharted – hence the title. His unprejudiced and sympathetic view of the locals, and his acute observations are remarkable for the time. It bares comparison to Freya Stark’s Winter in Arabia (which I have reviewed here), though I found Stark’s vivid and insightful prose a bit superior.

But Ms. Stark had already spent considerable time in the Mid-East at that point, and Greene’s trip to Africa was only his first abroad. Of course, it was only the beginning, as he was recruited into MI6, and later spent time in Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere. His sympathy with the downtrodden is reflected in his frequent choice of poor, hot countries as backdrops, often dubbed “Greeneland.”

Prosperous Switzerland, where Greene died in 1991, is the setting for his excoriation of greed, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980). The central character’s title is of dubious origin, as is that of his toady “General” Krueger; other associates, who attend his frequent parties, include M. Belmont, who’ll “solve any tax problem.” Fischer is so cruel he publishes a comic making fun of a disabled member of his entourage, Mr. Kips.

Greene’s satire is typically bolstered by clever use of narrative voice. Travels with my Aunt (1969, made into a 1972 movie) is told by a single, middle-aged naif, Henry Pulling, whose aunt takes him under her wing after the death of his mother. He soon embarks on eye-opening travels around Europe with the shrewd and worldly old lady. His gradual awareness that she is involved in crime, his first marijuana experience on a train to Istanbul, and other misadventures unfold in a manner that masterfully keep readers engaged and entertained. He, his aunt, and another character I’ll not disclose to avoid spoilers, end up in Paraguay. Great armchair travel.

I just finished The Quiet American (1955), about a U.S. operative in Vietnam back when the French were struggling against the communists. His title character, Pyle, who has just showed up in the country, insists that what the Vietnamese need is a “Third Force,” tainted with neither communism nor colonialism. His conviction rests solely on books by an American professor who himself never spent more than a week in the country. Despite Pyle’s naiveté and idealism, he soon gets himself involved in sinister dealings that may be his undoing. Prophetic stuff.

First-person character Fowler is older, cynical, and more perceptive by contrast. The story is driven largely by the odd rivalry that develops when Pyle unabashedly steals Fowler’s young Asian mistress, but the two remain friends. They’re nearly killed together one night after being trapped in a watchtower on the way back home to Saigon from an outlying town.

Despite his knowledge and wisdom, Fowler is an “unreliable narrator”: he smokes opium daily, admits that he’s not being honest in his correspondence with his estranged wife back in England. He at least questions his motivations, never claims to have much character or principles. And he clearly is attuned to the sufferings of the local population.

I have to re-read this one – I’m sure there’s lots of subtleties that didn’t catch my attention the first time around. Anyway, if you haven’t sampled Graham Greene yet, I hope I’ve piqued your curiosity.

The Church of the Intercesion on the Nerl was built in the 12th century under St. Andrei Bogolyubsky, Grand Prince of Vladimir-Suzdal and is found a couple of hours northeast of Moscow. It's well worth a small detour if you're visiting Vladimir and Suzdal, two cities of the famed Golden Ring, which showcase some of the richest exemplars of Russia's medieval heritage.

The Church sits on a area at the confluence of two rivers which tends to flood in the spring; the way it rises above it all has made it a frequent subject of photography. It also figured in the opening scene of Andrei Tarkovsky's monumental 1966 film Andrei Rublev, in which a peasant tries to fly from the bell tower in a crude 15th-century hot air balloon.

The first three pics are from my 2001 trip to Russia; the last from Wiki Commons.

See you next week with another edition of "Summer Reading List," this time a commentary on the works of Graham Greene.

I got to know Paul Theroux’s intercultural savvy and wanderlust years ago through his classic train-trip memoirs The Old Patagonian Express and The Great Railway Bazaar. I found the fictional technique of his 2012 The Lower River even more intriguing.

The novel begins when Ellis Hock’s wife deserts him, and he leaves his family’s menswear business to return to Malawi, where he’d served in the Peace Corps. Once there, he finds the school he helped build is run down, and the country is full of corruption.

I can identify with this nostalgia for a foreign stomping ground from younger days. I feel much the same attachment to Central Europe, especially Slovakia. The difference between Hock and me, though, is that I’ve kept in touch with Slovak friends and have revisited every couple of years.

And so I’ve not been quite as shocked. True, reforms that began just after the East Bloc’s dissolution haven’t panned out as I’d hoped: there have been far more winners than losers in the new economy, NATO membership has been as much about arms contracts as anything else. But there have been improvements in health, hygiene, safety, service with a smile, more open and questioning attitudes in education. English is now widely spoken, at least among under-forties, and I did my share as a language teacher (in part for the Soros Foundations).

But Slovakia is not Malawi, where Theroux spent his Peace Corps years. Back in 2005, the writer had lambasted the corrupting influence of Western aid—and the patronizing assumptions underlying it—in a New York Times op-ed called “The Rock Star’s Burden.” The Lower River represents an expansion of that critique into novel form.

It takes the reader through constant plot twists and unexpected developments, including Ellis Hock’s virtual entrapment in his old Malawian village. It makes masterful use of images, such as the snakes that keep appearing. Hock is a man who knows how to handle them in a place where they are deeply feared. But this is one of this flawed character's few strengths.

The character's weaknesses, his utter helplessness in the end, help make The Lower River the eye-opening, earthy thriller that it is.